Deictic Shifting through dreams, fantasies and nightmares, in Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007): A Study in Cognitive Stylistics

Peter Stockwell’s book Cognitive Poetics (2002) is an essential resource for understanding the value of cognitive stylistics and its impact on literary interpretation. As a new way of thinking about literature, this aspect of cognition involves the application of cognitive linguistics to literary texts, utilising a myriad of linguistic devices and frameworks such as the Deictic Shift Theory (2002). This research paper shows how deictic shifting through dreams, fantasies and nightmares in Khaled Hosseini’s novel A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) serves to accentuate lead characters’ desires, decisions and intricate relationships. The paper adopts cognitive poetics by drawing upon Peter Stockwell’s Deictic Shift Theory (2002) to present how pushes and pops influence the reader’s interpretation of thematic and aesthetic elements in the novel, such as the metamorphosis of complicated human relationships. The paper concludes that Hosseini has skillfully employed deictic shifting by means of pushes and pops through the dreams, nightmares and day-dreams of the three main female characters, to create a text world where these characters’ lives fatefully intersect, creating complicated relationships that eventually transform. Pushing into those dreams foreshadowed the fateful turns of events and revealed plenty of significant changes in the novel, that wouldn’t have had a more appropriate stage to disclose themselves.